ZTE Communications ›› 2012, Vol. 10 ›› Issue (1): 30-33.

• Special Topic • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Super-Receiver Design for Superchannel Coherent Optical Systems

Cheng Liu, Jie Pan, Thomas Detwiler, Andrew Stark, Yu-Ting Hsueh, Gee-Kung Chang, and Stephen E. Ralph   

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA
  • Received:2011-12-19 Online:2012-03-25 Published:2012-03-25
  • About author:Cheng Liu (lch_ian@gatech.edu) received his BS degree in electronics engineering from Peking University in 2008. He is currently pursuing a PhD degree in electrical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He is a member of the Georgia Tech 100G Consortium—an industry and academic research alliance of Verizon, ADVA Optical Networking, Ciena, OFS, and others. In 2010, he was a research intern at the digital communication group of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Boston, MA. His research interests include ultrahigh-speed coherent optical transmission systems, radio-over-fiber systems, and wavelength-division multiplexing passive optical networks (WDM PONs). He has authored and co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed journal papers and international conference proceedings.

    Jie Pan (jpan@gatech.edu) received her BS degree in electrical engineering from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technolgy in 2006. She received MS degrees in electrical engineering and chemical engineering from Miami University, OH. She is currently pursuing a PhD degree in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. She is a member of the Georgia Tech 100G Consortium. Her research interests include DSP for superchannel coherent optical systems.

    Thomas Detwiler (tom.detwiler@gmail.com) received his BSEE degree (honors) and MSEE degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2000 and 2003. He received his PhD degree at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 2011. In 2000, he worked on point-to-multipoint wireless access at WavTrace, which was later acquired by Harris Microwave Communications Division. At Harris Microwave, Thomas was a digital design engineer for point-to-point software-defined microwave radio. In 2006, he joined the FPGA technology development group at Adtran. From 2008 to 2011 he was a member of the Georgia Tech 100G Consortium researching modulation formats and demodulation techniques for coherent optical links.

    Andrew Stark (andy.stark@gmail.com) graduated magna cum laude with a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Texas, Dallas, in 2008. He spent a summer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as part of the Applied Engineering and Technology division. He is currently pursuing his PhD degree in electrical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He is a member of the Georgia Tech 100G Consortium.

    Yu-Ting Hsueh (yhsueh3@gatech.edu) received her BS degree in electrical engineering from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, in 2003. He received his MS degree in electro-optical engineering from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, in 2005. She is currently working toward her PhD degree in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. In 2010, she was a research intern in the Optical Networking and Mobile Communications group at NEC Laboratories America. She has authored and co-authored more than 40 peer-reviewed journal papers and international conference proceedings. She is one of the recipients of the 2010 PSC Bor-Uei Chen Memorial Scholarship and IEEE Photonics Society 2011 Graduate Student Fellowship.

    Gee-Kung Chang (geekung.chang@ece.gatech.edu) received his BSc degree in physics from the National Tsinghua University, Taiwan. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in physics from the University of California, Riverside. He worked for 23 years at Bell Systems: Bell Labs, Bellcore, and Telcordia Technologies. There, he held various research and management positions, including director and chief scientist of optical Internet research, director of the optical networking systems and testbed, and director of the optical system integration and network interoperability. Prior to joining Georgia Institute of Technology, he was vice president and chief technology strategist for OpNext Inc., an offshoot of Hitachi Telecom. He is currently the Byers Endowed Chair Professor in Optical Networking in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also the co-director of the 100G Optical Networking Center at Georgia Tech.

    Stephen E. Ralph (stephen.ralph@ece.gatech.edu) is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his BEE degree (honors) from Georgia Institute of Technology and PhD in electrical engineering from Cornell University. Prior to working at Georgia Tech., Dr. Ralph held a postdoctoral position AT&T Bell Laboratories and was a visiting scientist at the Optical Sciences Laboratory at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. In 1992, he joined the Physics Department at Emory University. In 1998, he joined Georgia Tech and is founder and director of the new 100 Gbit/s Optical Networking Consortium.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel super-receiver architecture for Nyquist-wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) superchannel optical coherent systems. As opposed to a conventional coherent receiver, where each subchannel is demodulated independently, the proposed super-receiver jointly detects and demodulates multiple subchannels simultaneously. By taking advantage of information from side channels that use joint DSP to cancel interchannel interference (ICI), the proposed super-receiver performs much better than a conventional receiver. This architecture also has the potential to compensate for cross-channel impairments caused by linear and nonlinear effects. We examine the proposed architecture through experiment and simulation. OSNR is improved by more than 5 dB after 1280 km fiber transmission with narrow channel spacing.

Key words: superchannel, joint DSP, ICI, coherent receiver